Without even a fig leaf of appearances of acting under the Rule of Law, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), via Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has arbitrarily seized over 70 privately owned domain names and websites, replacing them with a crypto-fascistic message. The actions take place even before the ‘Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act’ (COICA), passed by the U.S. Senate’s Judicial Committee, becomes law.

This administration has repeatedly said they do not have the staff nor the funds to control the illegal invasion underway, but the government can seize privately-held property to benefit corporations that predominantly fund Democrat candidates and the Democrat Party.

DHS and ICE are so far outside their charters regarding seizure of private property, just as is NASA now providing scientific ego-boo outreach to Muslims.

Candidate Obama promised a Civilian Security Force just as well staffed and equipped as the U.S. Military, now DHS shows signs of being just such an over-reaching and over-arching internal police force designed to keep the populace controlled and pacified.

And we now have political figures, Howard Dean for one, demanding that free speech as we have known it be restricted so as to not confuse voters. COICA is insidious to our constitutionally declared protections of governmental censorship, a message on Demonoid.com’s hompage reads like a treatise on fascist control:

If passed, this law will allow the government, under the command of the media companies, to censor the internet as they see fit, like China and Iran do, with the difference that the sites they decide to censor will be completely removed from the internet and not just in the US.

I am starting to think the Grand Experiment of American Freedom is over, the results pointing to the beginnings of a new Dark Ages. I hope I’m wrong.

(Reuters) – Two years after Vallejo, California, filed for bankruptcy protection, officials in nearby Antioch are also tossing around the ‘B’ word.

Of course cities want to declare bankruptcy, so they can get Uncle Sugar to bail them out and still continue the fiscally ruinous liberal programs and policies that ballooned the debt in the first place.

But wait, there’s more:

Orange County Treasurer Chriss Street would not be surprised if more local governments across the Golden State sound a similar alarm.

Street expects more talk of municipal bankruptcy across California because local government finances are in such dire shape — a situation underscored on Wednesday when a top finance officer for Sacramento County projected a worse-than-expected shortfall for the county of $181 million, which could force more than 1,000 layoffs from the county’s payroll.

Why is it such a surprise that an economic downturn in the private sector might actually extend to the public sector, especially when budgetary and fiscal responsibility is such an unknown quantity in liberal bastions?

Now if a municipal government was for declaring bankruptcy, and one of the results of the bankruptcy proceeding was to strip the public unions of much of their ill-gotten loot and undeserved influence on government, then I would be more supporting of the situation.

Now that the environmental Ponzi scheme known as Global Warming/Climate Change is being increasingly revealed as being bogus, the UN in an attempt to retain its hegemony at fleecing nations is poised to reintroduce and push the latest facet of global command control by yet again raising the alarm for maintaining a more balanced approach to maintaining biodiversity:

The economic case for global action to stop the destruction of the natural world is even more powerful than the argument for tackling climate change, a major report for the United Nations will declare this summer.

The Stern report on climate change, which was prepared for the UK Treasury and published in 2007, famously claimed that the cost of limiting climate change would be around 1%-2% of annual global wealth, but the longer-term economic benefits would be 5-20 times that figure.

The UN’s biodiversity report – dubbed the Stern for Nature – is expected to say that the value of saving “natural goods and services”, such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher – between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them.

The Big Con AGW failed to give the UN the control it craved, so they just change the game and begin the search for new marks to scam. The real question is how much money will be pissed away this time on yet another lie.

The Seattle city council is up to their armpits in dealing with a major budget deficit and a severe uptick in crime, yet they feel morally compelled to show their moral superiority and condemn a law from a different state.

Two weeks ago, the government put out a round estimate of the size of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico: 5,000 barrels a day. Repeated endlessly in news reports, it has become conventional wisdom.

But scientists and environmental groups are raising sharp questions about that estimate, declaring that the leak must be far larger. They also criticize BP for refusing to use well-known scientific techniques that would give a more precise figure.

There is even more more jaw-dropping examples of governmental incompetence:

The figure of 5,000 barrels a day was hastily produced by government scientists in Seattle. It appears to have been calculated using a method that is specifically not recommended for major oil spills.

Ian R. MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University who is an expert in the analysis of oil slicks, said he had made his own rough calculations using satellite imagery. They suggested that the leak could “easily be four or five times” the government estimate, he said.

“The government has a responsibility to get good numbers,” Dr. MacDonald said. “If it’s beyond their technical capability, the whole world is ready to help them.”

The NYT is having a hard time walking the tight-rope of unquestioning continuing praise for Obama and pandering to the enviro-nazis.

Early in Obama’s Presidency he opined about a law enforcement incident before he had any clue of what transpired simply because he didn’t like what had been reported, and the accused was a close, personal friend. Then we had our political masters shove an onerous piece of legislation without having even bothering to read the provisions. Now we have a political appointee give an official government “ruling” on a state law he never bothered to read.

Obama has shown in the past he is very willing to do favors for campaign contributers, especially corporate ones, and BP is shaping up to be one of the bigger ones. Yet now that the accident is taking on the dynamic of being his Katrina he is reverting to type and throwing BP under the bus to pander to his FAR Left base and the enviro-nazis.

An exodus of discouraged workers from the job market kept the U.S. unemployment rate from climbing above 10 percent in December, economists said.

Had the labor force not decreased by 661,000 last month, the jobless rate would have been 10.4 percent, according to economists including David Rosenberg at Gluskin Sheff & Associates in Toronto and Harm Bandholz at UniCredit Research in New York.

“The actual unemployment rate is higher than shown by the official numbers,” Bandholz said yesterday after a Labor Department report released in Washington showed the economy unexpectedly lost 85,000 jobs in December while the jobless rate was unchanged.

Not a whole lot I can say when the only hope and change people are getting is more and more unemployment and misery.

To add insult to injury the CEOs of Fannie and Freddy are going to get INCREASED pay, and in cash:

The pay packages for top officers are entirely in cash; company shares have been trading on the New York Stock Exchange at less than $2 apiece, and it isn’t clear when the companies will to profitability or whether common shares will have any value in the long term.

For the CEOs, annual compensation consists of a base salary of $900,000, deferred base salary of $3.1 million and incentive pay of as much as $2 million.

Looks like government supported/public sector fat cats are more than acceptable, unlike private sectors ones.